Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (3 page)

If you were me, from A to Z, if I were you, from Z to A...

Alan caught himself. His mind was spinning in loops, avoiding what had to be done next. It was time.

He scrubbed his features raw and donned his new face.

Chapter 2: The Skug

When Alan Turing reached Tangier in June, 1954, the city’s whitewashed lanes and towers seemed a maze of joy. He was elated with his escape from the shadowy agents who’d tried to assassinate him. And glad to leave the tedious, pawky computing machines of Manchester. He rented a comfortably furnished apartment and hid his money beneath a floorboard.

For now, Alan was free to do as he pleased—perhaps to idle, perhaps to push further with his startling new work on the chemical keys to biological morphogenesis. If he could fully fathom how Nature grows her knobby, gnarly forms, then he might well complete his lifelong quest to build a mind, to create a purely logical sentience by whom he could, at last, be understood.

He found that he loved Tangier on a visceral level. Every morning, Alan would take a long run on the empty beaches—the locals had little interest in the seaside. The quality of the light was uplifting. The muezzin calls to prayer were like intricately encrypted signals from a higher mind. And the cheeky street-boys of Tangier were a visual delight. For Alan, the Casbah was like a holiday fair with sweets at every turn—although, as yet, he hadn’t quite dared to sample the boys. He was still in some fear of hidden enemies.

Seeking out fellow expatriates, he encountered the louche international café society of Tangier. At home, he’d rarely hit it off with mannered aesthetes, but in this odd backwater, everyone was hungry for companionship.

In his first month, Alan often spent the evenings at the Café Central in the Socco Chico square, enjoying the free-wheeling euphoria, the cognac, the mint tea and the kief. A dissipated Oxford poet named Brian Howard would hold forth on beauty, and then William Burroughs, a sexy, sardonic American of Alan’s age, would send the group into gales of laughter with his scandalous routines. Alan noticed that amid the expatriates’ merry intimacy there was no stigma in being homosexual.

One night the camaraderie loosened Alan’s tongue to the point where he bragged to his raffish companions that he wasn’t really the man whose name stood in his Greek passport.

“I’m
not
Zeno Metakides,” Alan announced to the ring of smirking expats, his voice hoarsened by kief. “I only wear his
face
. In reality I’m a top-drawer mathematician who cracked the Hun’s cryptographic codes. I won the war, don’t you know—and now the Queen’s mandarins want to
rub me out
.”

The next morning Alan awoke with a start of horror. He must be suicidal, to be spilling his secrets to foppish wastrels who’d cut him cold, were they all back in London. He avoided the cafés from then on, going for his long runs along the sea in the mornings, visiting the market, and resuming his researches on computational morphogenesis.

To make his lab work more interesting, Alan had always preferred what he termed the “desert island” ideal. That is, he was in the habit of creating his experimental chemicals from substances that came readily to hand—things like foods or weeds or bits of offal that he found in the street. And so he began searching out suitable reagents and catalysts in the wares of the Moroccan street markets. Finding his way in the bedazzling maze of the souq was slow.

“What you look for?” asked a boy standing next to him at a shaded market stall one brilliant afternoon. He had sharp, crisp features and a friendly smile. He was about twenty—half Alan’s age.

“Elixirs,” said Alan, eying the youth. “Strong flavors.”

“I am Driss,” said the boy. One of his eyes was black, the other was hazel. “I can help you.” He walked around Alan, studying him from every side. And then he puckered his pretty lips and clucked, as if calling a chicken.

Alan’s heart fluttered within his chest. “I’m Alan,” he said. “I’ve only just moved here.”

“Ouakha,” said the boy, meaning something like okay. “Well met, al’An. We’ll cook dinner together, if you wish.”

“Excelsior,” said Alan.

Driss helped Alan pick out cardamom seeds, ginger root, pickled lemons, saffron, olives, semolina grain, lamb, incense, a small block of hashish and a bunch of odd-shaped vegetables. When they got back to Alan’s room, Driss smoked some of the hashish, and, growing coquettish, let Alan make love to him. As the afternoon waned they cooked a Moroccan couscous with lamb stew.

“Wonderful,” said Alan after the meal, feeling a rare moment of calm. “A feast for a sheik.” The evening walls were amber with shadows of lavender. A cool dry breeze wafted in a scent of resin from the hills’ gnarled pines. The muezzin wailed atop his minaret.

“You make medicine?” asked Driss, pointing toward the corner where Alan’s chemical concoctions sat. “Perfume?”

“I’m habitually lonely. You might say I long to grow a friend.”

Driss laughed merrily. “I am your friend, al’An. I am here and now. Full grown.”

“But perhaps I want to grow a
gnome
,” said Alan, getting to his feet with a spoon in hand. The rich food and the fumes of hashish had emboldened him. “Let me take a sample of your code. Open your mouth.”

Driss parted his lips and waggled his tongue. Alan ran the edge of the spoon along the smooth pink lining of the boy’s inner cheek, surely gathering up a few loose cells. And then he ran the spoon along the inside of his own cheek. He went and smeared the spoon against a layer of jellied mutton stock that sat in one of his flat pots.

“Our child,” said Alan.

Driss watched from his chair, eyes alert. He was wearing Alan’s bedroom slippers, his extra shirt and a pair of his boxer shorts.

“I must go home to my mother and my brothers,” said Driss as Alan returned to the table. He gestured at his borrowed garments. “Do you mind if I keep?”

“Ouakha,” said Alan with an extravagant gesture. “No matter.” He was free of England for good.

Over the coming weeks, Driss became a regular visitor. He’d run errands for Alan or guide him around the town. And often he’d spend a morning or an afternoon in Alan’s bed.

Fondly watching the youth’s comings and goings from his balcony, Alan would scan for signs of a security breach, vaguely strategizing his plans for further flight. But so far, nothing he did in Tangier seemed to have real consequences. Perhaps he’d escaped Her Majesty’s scrutiny for good.

Driss knew a fair amount of English, and he seemed to have a flair for abstract reasoning. Sometimes when they had an idle half hour, Alan would feed Driss a tidbit of mathematics. One day, for instance, he showed him a visual proof of the Pythagorean theorem—the figure involved a smaller square inscribed at an angle within a larger one. Another day he pasted together a paper Mobius strip, and got the youth to cut the strip down the middle with Alan’s nail scissors.

“How many pieces will we have?” asked Alan in his role of maths master.

“Cut makes two,” said Driss.

“Tallyho!” said Alan. “The phantoms of maths are more
wriggly
than you dream, young wizard. Snip and see.”

“Only one piece!” observed Driss when he was done snipping along the length of the band. “The two are twisted into one.”

“Like us, dear Driss,” said Alan, venturing to caress the youth’s cheek. Driss smiled and set the curling band of paper on Alan’s head like a crown.

The golden days slid by. Though dwindling, Alan’s hoard of cash was not yet exhausted. He pressed forward on his morphogenesis research. The smooth, fluid, self-generating mechanisms of biology were a relief from the electromechanical brains with their gears, wires, relays, electronic valves. The dabbling play in his makeshift lab was wonderfully unlike the communal politics of building an unwieldy computing machine. Thanks to his new biotweaking procedures, his cultured tissues would become programmable life forms.

The key was to create universal cells. The human body was known to have over two hundred distinct types of cells, all of them descended from the original cells of the early embryo. Alan’s near-term goal was to coax the culture of his and Driss’s cells into a primitive, Edenic state. These embryo-style cells would have great powers. By manipulating their morphonic fields, Alan would interact with them and train them to behave in desirable ways.

Patiently, and one small step at a time, Alan treated his burgeoning colony with delicate amounts of the catalysts that he’d found around Tangier. As well as the market spices, he drew venom from the jaws of a centipede he’d crushed, squeezed a drop of liquid resin from a lump of hashish, and even contributed a few drops of his own semen.

A bad smell was developing in the apartment, a nasty pong. When Alan first noticed it at, he thought it was the accumulating garbage.

Meanwhile he was finally bringing the little culture into a truly primordial state. These undifferentiated cells were theoretically capable of becoming any kind of cell at all—skin, blood, bone, neuron, muscle—whatever. But Alan wasn’t quite sure how he’d communicate with his undifferentiated tissue. As a way of getting started, he began talking to the culture when he was alone. Trying to teach it like a child or a pet seemed to make sense.

“Look what I have here,” he told Driss, when the youth next appeared. It was noon, with the slanting sun lying on Alan’s floor like a slab of iron. “Our offspring. A smart slug. Potentially smart, in any case.”

Alan held out the dish, with the consommé supporting a thumb-sized glob of tan cells, longer than it was wide. The dish itself was glazed in labyrinthine patterns of blue and white.

“Skug?” said Driss, misunderstanding him. He hadn’t been paying much attention to Alan’s morphogenetic experimentation.

Alan laughed exorbitantly. “A
skug
, yes. The official name for our creation henceforth.” He tried to enfold Driss in a hug, but the boy stepped away, as from a bad odor.

“This skug grows from our spit?” said Driss, peering at the bowl.

“It’s powerful,” said Alan. “Plenipotent.” He leaned over it. “The skug hears me, I’m sure of it.”

Ever so slightly the surface of the yellowish creature wriggled.

“What sorcery can the skug do?” asked Driss. He seemed uneasy with Alan today. Standoffish.

“I suspect it can merge with other beings,” said Alan. “Let’s test,” said Alan, looking around the apartment. A dark red cockroach was skulking beside the overflowing kitchen trashcan. Tip-toeing over with exaggerated caution, Alan used a spoon to flick a droplet of some skug-flesh onto the roach—and the insect melted into a lacquered puddle.

“Wrong species,” said Alan equably. “Too low in complexity to be worthy of our skug. How about—one of those
lizards
sunning themselves on the balcony railing?”

“As you like, al’An,” said Driss, and fetched one of the little creatures. Alan used the spoon to smear a bit of the pink skug-jelly onto the writhing captive, being careful not to get the stuff on his or Driss’s hands.

The lizard hissed and sprouted a pair of membranous wings, rising up from his back like a pair of rainbows.

“
Awwah
,” cried Driss, dropping the thing. The tweaked creature crawled and fluttered across the shadowed room, out to the balcony, and immediately fell off the edge and into the street. Driss ran down after it—but returned empty-handed.

“It’s gone?” asked Alan.

“It’s dead,” said Driss. “I don’t like to touch these behexed things.” He sniffed the air and gave Alan a significant look. “You yourself—you are unwell, yes?”

Suddenly it became clear that the apartment’s bad smell was coming from Alan’s plastered-on Zeno-face. Odd that he hadn’t realized this. Repressing the truth. The tissue-culture was losing its ability to integrate with Alan’s metabolism. His face was dying.

“I’m fine,” insisted Turing. He had a distinct feeling that Driss might not be coming back again. And so he pressed the youth into a half-hearted coupling.

Alan dropped off to sleep after his orgasm. When he woke alone, he saw that Driss had cleaned out the stash of travel money that Alan had hidden so well—he’d thought—under the floorboard beneath the stove. This time he knew better than to go to the police.

Alan set aside his pique and focused on his medical condition. There seemed to be no way to actually
remove
the dying Zeno face—it was too tightly integrated with his old tissues. And plastering a fresh new face over that was unlikely to heal the decay. His condition was akin to cancer. A challenge indeed.

His main hope was that he might reverse the necrosis of his Zeno face with an application of undifferentiated tissue, assuming the stuff were properly coached. The canny undifferentiated cells might migrate inward and replace the dying cells—like fresh players entering a game of rounders. Perhaps his face would take on the charming angularity of Driss’s features.

But for now, Alan hesitated, unwilling to chance some brutal malfeasance on the part of the skug. In order to continue paying his rent, he found a part-time job in a repair shop run by an
opéra bouffe
fat man named Pierre Prudhomme. As if driven by theatrical clockwork, Pierre’s treacly wife Marie flirted heavily with Alan, completely blind to his lack of interest.